“Jesus, Diederman. How long has it been since you’ve been on the mainland?”
The man frowned. “Several weeks ago.”
“But you’re usually here?”
“I am.”
“Then you don’t know that the juice you’re generating is replacing other energy consumption so that Eisenach and his buddies can store up fuel for war? Along with all the new tanks and ships and planes?”
Diederman swung his big head toward General Eisenach and stared.
“You will never prevail.”
“I’ll be damned. You can talk, General.”
“I know things you do not know.”
This son of a bitch was a walking zombie. Staring right through McKenna.
“You probably do. Like what?”
One hand lifted slightly and turned palm up. Not much of a gesture.
“This? This? Only a mild setback. The Aryan nation is destined to lead, to control, to people this world.”
One of those.
McKenna shifted the muzzle of the assault rifle toward the general. He now thought that Eisenach was more dangerous than Diederman.
“And even now,” Eisenach said, “you have won nothing. You will have, in fact, created an environmental calamity. It is your own doing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Eisenach smiled at him.
Diederman pointed to a black box on the first console. A red light was blinking on the face of it.
“The general thought it would be an excellent idea to wire each of the wells with explosives. That box activates the system.”
Eisenach smiled. “It cannot be stopped. The wells will all erupt within fifty minutes.”
“However,” Diederman said, “I did not think it was such a good idea. The explosives are in place, but they are not wired.”
Eisenach spun around toward the big man, his mouth agape, a snarl emitting from it. He pawed his uniform jacket, scratching, digging.
And came up with a Walther automatic.
Diederman moved fast for his size. He went down sideways, kicking a castered chair at Eisenach.
The technicians scattered, diving under desks and chairs.
The chair caught Eisenach in the knees as he fired his first shot. The report rang in the confined space, but the slug went into a wall.
The general toppled over the chair, then fell trying to get off it. He rolled onto the floor and raised the pistol at McKenna.
McKenna shot him in the forehead, slamming his head into the floor, snapping his eyes wide open.
A very small hole, barely trickling blood.
“Good shot, amigo.”
McKenna wasn’t so sure. Maybe hatred for this kind of bastard got in the way of justice.
The long, slow, rambling, errant wheels of justice. Diederman struggled to his feet.
“Colonel,’’ McKenna said, backing toward the doorway, “I think you’d better get your people back to the mainland.”
The large German didn’t say anything. He just looked at the body of the dead Nazi.
McKenna and Munoz ran back across the corridor and down the stairs. Several men rushing up the stairs, to see what all the noise was about, changed their minds, and ran back down ahead of them.
By the time they reached the first floor and stepped out into another wide and long corridor, there were only a half-dozen men to be seen. And they quickly disappeared through a doorway on the left.
It was a hushed atmosphere, despite the muted whine of the turbine generators on the other side of the corridor’s end wall.
“How you doing, Tony?”
“Aspirin’ll take care of it.”
“None in the kit?”
“Sure. I took six.”
McKenna rushed across the corridor to another Verboten door and found it locked. He backed away and fired four shots into the lock.
The 5.56-millimeter slugs disintegrated the lock and the door swung open.
There were six men inside the three-story-high room, and they all cowered against the back wall. Thick cables traversed the space, fifteen feet and more off the floor. Metal-clad boxes lined the room and ran in rows down its center. All of them bore markings in German and control panels — dials, gauges, digital readouts, levers, buttons.
“If it says ‘on’, Tony, we want it off.”
“Damn betcha, compadre.”
The six men didn’t move as McKenna and Munoz went down the rows, throwing switches.
McKenna envisioned various parts of Germany going dark. The mainland engineers, with no warning that the Greenland generators were going off-line, would be scrambling to find new sources of energy with which to restore power. The fact that it was night might help them out a little, but tomorrow, those factories and industries that had converted from fuel oil and coal to electricity might well be shut down.
One of the men against the back wall began to babble in excited German.
“What’s he sayin’, Kev?”
“Damned if I know. I’d cover a bet, though, that shutting the output down will throw an overload on the turbine generators on all of the wells. Might even burn them out.”
“Too damned bad,” Munoz said. “What about the alternate route, though? On eleven?”
“Their communications are down. The people on eleven might not find out until it’s all over.”
The lights in the Switching Room blinked, came back, blinked again, then went out. A few seconds later, they came back on, but very dim.
“Emergency generator,” Munoz said.
As soon as they’d reversed as many switches and levers as they could find, McKenna gestured with his rifle and herded the Germans out of the room.
Then he and Munoz burned up two magazines apiece of 5.56 ammo. The racket was deafening, and when they were done, the control panels were a shambles.
They slipped into the corridor to find twenty men gathered around, backing away as they changed magazines
“Hey!” McKenna yelled.
The mob stopped moving.
McKenna crossed the corridor, picked out two men, and relieved them of their parkas. He tossed one to Munoz and they slipped into them, then pulled the hoods over their heads.
Munoz led the way to the door and outside onto the helicopter pad.
The rotors were already turning, the faces of the two pilots lit by red instrument panel lights.
“Leave the rifles,” McKenna said, dropping his onto the deck.
Munoz dropped his own, and they marched across the pad toward the chopper, looking, McKenna hoped, like departing German bigwigs.
The pad was littered with pieces from the dome. One of the SAM radar trailers lay on its side, shattered. The other one was gone entirely, probably blown into the sea.
The wind coming across the pad was chilled, but not too strong.
They performed the obligatory ducking from rotors that were high overhead, but it helped to conceal their faces.
Munoz parted from him, headed toward the other side of the chopper. When he reached the helicopter, a small MBB converted to command use, McKenna ignored the passenger compartment, reached for the pilot’s door, and jerked it open. He leaned in toward a startled pilot, flicked open the quick release harness buckle, then hauled him out of the cockpit.
“Sorry,” he said. “This one’s taken.”
The man spluttered his indignation in German while McKenna scrambled inside and pulled on a headset.
Munoz had similar success and similar indignation on the other side. When he plopped into the copilot’s seat, he asked, “How long’s it been since you’ve flown rotary, Snake Eyes?”
“Fourteen, fifteen years.”
“That’s comfortin’.”
“Like riding a bicycle,” McKenna said, running the throttles up. When the tachometers showed high, but not yet in the red, he pulled collective.
And nearly went back into the dome, overcorrecting for the wind, skittering across the pad, dragging the skids, before he got it stabilized and airborne.